The Other Mile-High Club | Hacker News Reader

The Other Mile-High Club

motherboard.vice.com

78 pointsDiabloD373 comments

If I run a computer system that commits a crime because of a bug, I will be held accountable for my system's actions.

For example, I might misconfigure my FTP server to include my music collection, facilitating piracy. Or I might write a shopping cart that takes everyone's money and doesn't deliver their product. An "honest mistake" defense won't get you off the hook for these.

Since the law applies to everyone equally, airlines should also be responsible for their mistakes. We have laws against false advertising for good reason and if we stop enforcing them, companies will take advantage.

It's not "false advertising." It's a mistake. Whether or not you agree, it's pretty well established that companies can cancel orders for items that are priced incorrectly--especially if they're in the "so good you must know they're not true" category. It's basically analogous to the signs you see in supermarkets about incorrect pricing in their weekly mailing. Some of the associated legalisms are that the order isn't necessarily consider "accepted" until it goes out for shipment as I understand it.

Clawing back money for something that's already been delivered is much much more problematic though.

> It's not "false advertising." It's a mistake.

And yet if the consumer makes a mistake it's a $100 change fee to fix the mistake.

In the U.S. all airlines allow you to cancel your reservation at no charge within 24 hours of booking, so if you make a mistake, then you can cancel your reservation and make a new one.

Only if the flight is more than 7 days away. And, they make you 'rebook', and as the GP comment said, the fares change on a minute-by-minute basis, so you're probably going to have to pay more.

You seem to be implying that if you make a mistake while booking a flight, and as a result the airline refunds all of your money, then if you have to pay more for the flight you actually wanted than you would have paid when booking the original (mistaken) flight, the airline has harmed you. Do I have that right? If so, could you explain your theory of how the airline has wronged you?

Harm in this context has to be defined legally, not intuitively. If what you are claiming is the case, then there would never be a penalty for breaking a contract, other than not having to fulfill your side of the bargain. But there are tons of ways in which breaking a contract could harm you.

Let's take your example, using airline tickets. Imagine you are the purchaser of the tickets, and I am the airline you purchased them from.

You might miss the opportunity to book another flight at a cheaper price, since you relied on my promise of a flight, and now you must rebook.

You might miss your opportunity to travel at all, or must now change your travel plans, because all of the flights are overbooked.

You might have budgeted very carefully, and purchased hotel reservations and a car rental, and now I have cancelled your flight and you cannot afford more expensive tickets because you already purchased a hotel and car, and you are over budget.

All of these are reasonable scenarios that I would have encountered traveling, if an airline refused to honor its reservation. This is why contracts have to be honored, and the penalty for breaking a contract is typically more than "you just don't have to honor your side of the contract".

> For example, I might misconfigure my FTP server to include my music collection, facilitating piracy. Or I might write a shopping cart that takes everyone's money and doesn't deliver their product. An "honest mistake" defense won't get you off the hook for these.

Honest mistakes will indeed get you off the hook in your examples. Criminal laws have intent requirements, and honest mistakes usually don't clear the bar for criminal culpability.

Now, if the circumstances are such that the jury simply doesn't believe it was an honest mistake, rather than intentional, that's a different issue.

> Criminal laws have intent requirements

Most criminal laws have mental state requirements, and intent is the highest requirement that criminal laws might have. Many criminal laws do not have intent requirements -- requiring only recklessness or negligence, for instance -- and some are strict liability (requiring only that the prohibited act be done, independent of mental state.)

> and honest mistakes usually don't clear the bar for criminal culpability.

Honest, but unreasonable, mistakes can clear the bar for crimes with recklessness or negligence requirements rather than intent requirements, and honest and reasonable mistakes do so for ones that are of the strict liability type.

"Intent requirement" can be used synonymously with "culpability requirement" or "mens rea" (how I used it). Though it can also mean intent rather than recklessness or criminal negligence (how you used it). To me, the "honest" part suggests simple rather than criminal negligence. It's not an "honest mistake" (imho) to lock the doors to a crowded bar from the outside so people perish in a fire.

EDIT: Though my wife disagrees about "honest mistake" so there's that.

The CFAA defines no strict-liability crimes, as you well know.

Honest mistakes do not just "get you off the hook". Depending on the crime committed "intent" vs "accidental" may result in differing severities of the punishment handed down.

Note that in this case many of the ticket purchasers were held to be "acting in bad faith" since they falsely declared their location as Denmark to obtain the deal proced in DKK, in which case I have no problem with the airline voiding those transactions. When customers act in good faith I agree there is more of an issue.

I really don't like this vulture culture. The main defence seems to be "the airlines are bad too". My six year-old now knows this doesn't cut any ice.

This vulture behaviour even extends to ruining small companies. In the UK recently I read of a company on amazon with a far lower price on a product than intended and the twitter crowd were all out demanding the company "honour" the price even though everyone knew it was an error. Amazon were of course siding with the customer but the company was saying it would put them out of business.

This class of mistake is a cost of doing business when airlines have computers and people playing these ridiculous revenue optimization games.

Unlike virtually any other business, it's really difficult to accept the excuse of fare "misprints" when in many cases airlines reprice routes several times per day, or even multiple times per hour. I'm sure that if they were able to say "oops", the number of "mistakes" would spike whenever unexpected demand was encountered.

If they have issues with employees fat fingering fares, perhaps they should review the internal controls.

I worked for a tiny online retailer that also did drop shipping for some companies with similar products. Once, someone found a hidden product someone had uploaded as a test: $1500 marked down to $0. It got posted on reddit and hundreds of orders came in all at once. They took the product off their site and canceled all of the orders, but the nastiness and persistence by the people who had placed orders insisting that they deserved this thing for free was mind boggling. There was clearly very little understanding that there were real humans on the other end of this website whose days they were making much more difficult.

Wasn't that a case of using a dynamic pricing service that went wrong?

They abdicated their responsibility for setting prices to let a piece of software set the prices for them instead. If the software did not set the price the way they wanted it is, ultimately, their own fault.

In a race to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the market they used dynamic pricing software and got screwed.

I've flown from SEA-NYC for $1.86. I flew from YYV to Romania, and onto Turkey, for $200. I flew with my family of 5 in first class from SEA-YTO (Toronto) for $0, on Air Canada. Too many others to count. All from flyertalk. It's not as good as it used to be but there were times I've taken whole flights full of flyertalkers headed somewhere basically for free.

Key to success: Find some friends who also like to do this and who will wake you up in the middle of the night if they find a great deal (and won't complain if you reciprocate). It's hard to watch flyertalk all the time and the deals go quickly.

Just curious did you actually want to fly to new york? Or was it a case of "wow it is only 1.86 to go to nyc, i guess i am going".

nah, you have to be up for random trips or have a list of places that you would be willing to go if free. It's much less likely that one will pop up conveniently for a trip you need to make any time soon.

Totally not need-based. A buddy and I just bought them and we decided to just make a weekend of it, went to a few good restaurants, saw a show.

I actually just started a service to do just that. For $8/m, I'll email/text people when the craziest deals drop. It's temoprarily sitting at amazingairfare.zaccohn.com, if you're interested.

I don't know I'd be willing to pay $8/mo for a service where I don't know if the notifications will be timely enough or of actually good deals. But I would happily pay 10-15% of the ticket price as a finder's fee for any deal that turns out awesome. (Kind of like the recruiter / employee referral model, where the company pays 15-30% of the starting salary as a fee.)

Hard to enforce, though, so you'd most likely have to go on the honor system.

Why not give it the "Magic" treatment? Provider broadcasts emails / text messages. You can respond with some simple code, like "YES" or "BUY". Provider will then attempt to purchase at that rate using stored information. I would think the service fee would be best as a percentage with a minimum.

That's tough because purchasing is often difficult. It took me dozens of tries to get a flight booked to Cypress once, through 4 cities. I ended up deciding the onerous itinerary was not worth the nearly free ticket. That's common so you don't necessarily want to insert yourself into these transactions for people, it really wouldn't scale.

It's not just that it wouldn't scale - it wouldn't work even if I only had a dozen subscribers!

One problem with the % cut model is if your service is really good (and finds those $1.86 flight deals), then you get a pittance. Maybe a flat $8 for each deal?

$96 a year. I seem to be sending out 2-3 deals a month, sometimes more. If you book ONE deal (out of 24-36+), and save $400 off average price... it's worth it.

If you don't think that's worth it - then you probably don't fall into the customer segment this is targeted toward. :)

Also, the "finders fee" model requires a ton more work. Integrating with all the 3rd party ticketing sites (kayak, orbitz, priceline), and ALL the first party ones (delta, united... etihad... cebu air... aeroflot... etc etc etc). Considering this is a side project, that quickly becomes prohibitive.

I'd sign up, but I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland. I guess that you only offer US-based deals?

I'm focused on that now, yeah. But even though I can't help you right now... here's a whole section of a site focused on European deals: http://www.secretflying.com/euro-deals/

Keep an eye out there. :) Lots of good stuff coming out of Dublin lately. Shouldn't be too far from you.

I am probably exactly your target market. But I'm also very particular about the way I fly and optimize for status. The variables in my case are that I'm only really interested in UA flights out of SFO. The likelyhood of a deal like that even showing up at all on the service is very low; which is why I probably won't get anything for my $96.

That said, if something did show up; I would gladly pay that $96, or more, in an instant.

Just a data point.

I'm more focused on people who are more interested in going somewhere awesome for not a lot of money than what airline they're flying.

I appreciate the data point, and honestly targeting people like you is probably a larger/more lucrative market. But that would require a lot more building and systems integration, and as this is just a side project, I'm not planning to expand to serve that need. Definitely appreciate the feedback though.

I have a similar track record to you from Flyertalk. As I also mentioned below, I also check http://www.pointsbuzz.com for any breaking opportunities.

Out of curiosity, were those free with or without taxes/fees?

One of my friends about 12 years ago found round trip tickets from NYC to Egypt for $0 + taxes and fees. Fees came to about $100-$200 or so. He immediately bought 10 tickets for himself and friends. So an amazing deal, but still not free when considering taxes and fees.

Those were all-in. The $0 Air Canada one they actually called me and said that technically there was no contract of carriage because there was no money exchanged, but they let me have it anyway. And actually I remember now, it was $200 to Romania, and we ended up paying $230 more to get to turkey on a standard ticket. The Bucharest ticket was surely supposed to be $2000.

I find it sad that there are people who think because someone makes a mistake you should be allowed, in fact a 'right', to take advantage of them.

I understand if you don't realise and their mistake sets you back you should get some sort of resolution.

But come off it, everyone in these groups knows when it's a pricing error.

These groups are fun, I do like them, but when some members think they are entitled to something because mistakes happen I have issue.

Airlines have taken advantage of me for making a mistake so many times. Once I booked I accidentally booked a flight for February 12, when the conference I was going to was actually March 12. I didn't realize until the day of my actually purchased flight. There was no sympathy for me, I simply had to buy another ticket.

That's different because it's not obvious to them, especially since you waited so long. Your parent comment is referring to situations where it's obvious some sort of mistake was made and yet you jump on it and exploit it knowing that something wasn't right.

How do I know what fares are obviously mistakes? Fare prices are all over the place. They quite often charge less for a round-trip than a one-way to the same destination, which is not a mistake at all, that fact makes it clear that it's not obvious which fares are mistakes and which aren't, or I'd think all of those were!

It may not always be obvious, but as an example, the $1.86 flight that another poster mentioned should certainly trip your "this isn't right" sensor.

Yet he completed the trip. How hard would it be for the airlines to code something that says if price/mile is less than $x.xx, do not post, do not complete transaction, alert development team. And yet they haven't and this continues to happen.

Why?

Companies do all sorts of bizarro price offers. Megabus offers $1 fares to encourage pre-booking. Target sells $6 shampoo for 90% off when it sits for awhile. $1.86 may be preferable to an empty chair for some reason.

Pretending to be in Denmark to score a deal is acting in bad faith... But if you offer something for sale at a bad price, that's your problem.

Well, If I had an account with a billing address in Denmark while I lived in the US, would that suddenly change the morality of the situation?

I don't see how either of those things is any more or less obvious than the other.

Despite telling their children the opposite, I think most people have a strong belief that "two wrongs make a right", or equivalently "what goes around comes around".

Taking advantage of pricing errors provides an incentive to reduce the incidence of pricing errors.

I would say part of it is the way airlines price tickets in the first place. Instead of pricing them as some sort of cost plus basis, they use software to squeeze every penny they can out of flights. This causes ticket prices to vary wildly. It personally makes me angry that to get a good price I have to try to predict the right time to book a flight. If they get to game me by dynamically changing prices then why can't I game them by taking advantage of the lowest prices when they are availiable?

In Canada an offer to trade is legally binding. At least for the first sale of a erronous advertisement.

Legally speaking if a company posts a screaming good deal in a flyer or advertisement they have to honour the first sale, but after that may make corrections.

This has been tested in court.

Also, if you make an offer and accept a response by mail, the second the response hits the mailbox (NOT the postmark) it's considered accepted.

So if you offer to sell something, to person A who who responds via mail but sell to person B before the letter gets to you you're legally bound to make person A whole.

This too has been tested in court.

This is why you now see legalize at the bottom of flyers now which says the in store price is the valid price if disagreements pop up.

Couldn't airlines put some fineprint into any offer, that they are not actually selling you a straight up flight ticket, but a flight ticket that comes with the option for the company / obligation for the customer of a buyback at the price paid (or, say, 110% of the price paid)?

I started a community for this exact purpose. It's called Oyster Chat and it's free to join We've got about 400 travelers on Oyster Chat right now and membership is growing at 10-15% per week. We collectively share the best flight deals, but unlike FlyerTalk it encourages real-time discussion and you receive city-specific notifications. It's hosted on Slack right now.

Over fifty flights have been booked so far based on the discussion in there. Oyster Chat is an extension of my flight hacking business Yore Oyster.

Happy to answer any questions about it, and anyone interested in flying cheaply is encouraged to join and contribute to make our community even more valuable.

-Jordan

How do you join? Got a link to the slack room?

oysterchat.com. You'll get an email invitation within 30 minutes of signing up.

Thanks, signed up! :-)

Claiming you're from Denmark when you're not to receive an advantage is fraud. I wouldn't expect a company or a prosecutor to press charges over it, but demanding that your fraudulent transaction be honoured certainly seems like pushing your luck.

"Oh, no, I must have put Denmark by mistake."

The crux of the article:

  “People absolutely have no qualms screwing 
   airlines," he said, "because they just 
   hate them."

It is probably true. I think the pricing mechanisms make this true - every time I get on a plane I am annoyed that there will be others on board that have paid significantly less than me, and I suspect that, Lake Woebegone style, so does everyone else on the plane.

I don't know if the maths will support it, but an airline that actually charges flat fares may win enormous amounts of good will.

I don't see why this is even an issue. You publish a bad price due to your own incompetence. You should have to honor the fare.

If the airline overcharged someone due to an error, do they give refunds?

If you accidentally buy 100000 shares of a stock when you meant to type 1000, you don't get a redo. Why should airlines be any different?

I once saw replacement electric shaver heads on sale in Rite-Aid. The price should have been $30 but they charged me $1. When I saw how it rang up, I bought another two. Can Rite-Aid demand $58 from me? How is this different?

> If the airline overcharged someone due to an error, do they give refunds?

Yes

The legal answer to your question is that they reserve the right to refund your ticket at any time up to the point of you actually being in the air. Buying a product at a retailer, where your interaction ends when they hand you a receipt, isn't really the same. The comparison would be better if United had tried to charge consumers after the flight. The real question, if you want to use the Rite-Aid example, is "should the employee be allowed to investigate the $1 price tag upon seeing it rung up," and yes, in my opinion, they absolutely should.

That gets to the moral answer, which I think is what you're really asking, I honestly don't think it's that black and white. From the perspective of a business, there are two phases to this mistake, right? The first is letting them buy a ticket; the second is honoring that ticket. The first part doesn't hurt; the second hurts a lot. If I can catch that mistake before the second phase, why shouldn't I? Maybe I'll lose some customers who are genuinely upset that they couldn't take advantage of a bug in my software, but in the long run, I'm not convinced it's harmful.

Meanwhile, from a consumer standpoint, as someone who has -- many times -- bought things at a premium discount because of a bug in software (preorder costs for video games are especially vulnerable to this), each and every time I make that purchase, I'm willing to accept that if they catch it before they ship it and want to refund me the discounted purchase price, fine. I know I'm exploiting someone's mistake and I feel like that's not completely honest.

> If the airline overcharged someone due to an error, do they give refunds?

Yes?

This is an issue, and United is allowed to deny the tickets, because the non-Danish citizens that tried to enter a purchase contract with United did it under false pretenses (i.e. putting down their country of citizenship as Denmark to trigger the pricing error when they were not Danish citizens). Contract law gets pretty precise under these situations.

Airlines have been held to task when people found legitimate fares and honestly purchased a ticket. This was not one of those situations.

More generous airlines and other large corporations have been known to honor the price anyway to avoid a P/R fiasco and generate goodwill. From my experience, UAL is not one of those companies. =)

Were they putting Denmark as the citizenship for ticket details or putting Denmark as the billing country for a creditcard to trigger the correct billing currency?

I read it as a simple billing currency issue.

When I'm at a retailer or a restaurant or wherever and there's an honest mistake, I point it out. I try to treat everyone in a way that I would hope to be treated in the same circumstance. IMO, anything else is selfish and exploitative.

I don't know what point you were trying to make with you Rite Aid example, but it just makes me discount your opinion on all things moral. Did you really need that $58, or do you just like pulling one over on people?

> If you accidentally buy 100000 shares of a stock when you meant to type 1000, you don't get a redo.

For the record, you might. Stock exchanges retroactively break many trades as "Clearly Erroneous".

[1] http://www1.nyse.com/pdfs/CEE_Policies_Email_Submission_Guid... [2] http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=clearlyerroneous

Anyone got any links to places where stuff like this gets posted ;)

The forum linked in the first paragraph of the article?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mileage-run-discussion/165403...

I set up a Yahoo Pipe to email me in realtime as any deal for SFO gets posted.

I just did a trip like this to Seychelles for $400.

Wrote about it here --> http://impossiblehq.com/say-yes-adventure

There's a good round of links that I follow for good deals near the bottom.

Hope that helps!

Was the ticket mispriced or do you think Etihad was just running an aggressive promotion?

It was a mistake fare, but Etihad jumped all over the opportunity for good press.

It was mis-priced, but Etihad did a standup job, got extra press & honored the tickets.

United did the opposite, which is one of many reasons why no one likes flying United.

If you are in Canada (or near a Canadian airport) you can check out YY#deals.com. Replace the # with the airport code.

Flyertalk is probably your best resource. After that, I keep track of breaking industry news at http://www.pointsbuzz.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com